Read The Harder They Fall Online
Authors: Gary Stromberg
The Harder They Fall (25 page)
So there was sanity but a realization that I needed others’ help. As we say, often when we go into those depths is when we hit the walls of old defenses that don’t work anymore, old ways of dealing with our problems. I think that’s the power of recovery when you hit those invisible walls and suddenly say, “What is that?” And you’re able to talk to people or write it out, or perhaps go to a doctor and say, “What is this?” And you get an answer, because we are born now. We can get the answers now. I found that most of my stuff was answered with the support of suicide survivors. I like the idea we survivors are literally soldered together by our common experience.
I think that the toughest thing in the world for those of us who are alcoholics to accept is success. It’s not just the drama—we’re used to that. It’s learning how to say thank you and shut up. Not just in a small way—in a big way. This also concerns receiving love in relationships, and learning how to become successfully intimate. We have to learn what it’s really like to be with a loving companion.
All of us are in such a process of integration, constantly, whether we want to be or not. What the opportunity of recovery or sobriety does for me is I become conscious of the integration. Even if I’m doing the same things without alcohol, I can learn from that situation now. I don’t have to go back into that rat’s cage again and again and again. Which is what alcohol does. It makes me forget. It’s a disease that keeps saying I have no disease.
Once when I had just come out West, I was going to do a movie called
Come Fly with Me
. Dolores Hart and I were going to do it together. She was one of these young starlets under contract, and I just fell in love with her. We were going to go on this incredible trip with the wonderful actor Karl Malden when I got sick. I ended up with a crazy doctor who said I had hepatitis but I didn’t, and another actress got the part. Then Dolores got smart and became a nun. My work with survivors was getting very heavy because I wasn’t a trained therapist. I hadn’t seen Dolores for forty-five years when I went to her as a spiritual adviser. We sat opposite each other, with this makeshift trellis between us in this tiny cloistered room, and I said, “I’m in trouble. I want so much to be of use, but I don’t know how to continue doing this.” I expected her to say, “Why are you going back to that place: your pain?” To the contrary, she said, “Mariette, this is your journey, your mission, probably why you were born.” And I went, “Oh fuck!” Then she talked about resonance. When you drop a petal in the water and the ripples go, do they stop at the water’s edge or continue? Then she said what stayed with me. “You know, I’ve learned in my thirty years of contemplation …” You know, that blew me away because if I’m quiet for fifteen minutes, I think I’ve died! She said, “One’s deepest wounds, integrated, become one’s greatest powers.”
We are all traveling on this earth together, and what these unexpected visitations in your life, the angels, do is help us to shift. I’ve had more of a chance of recognizing angels sober. That’s a glory of this experience. I can learn from my mistakes. I don’t have to hide from anybody. I’m a part of the Good Host. It’s the recognition, and being still and knowing. Once I finally surrendered—and this is what I wish people got—you have to be careful, because it’s bright. The light is very bright. And people who hide don’t necessarily want to see it. … Holy God, it’s like learning how to live all over again!
The field of moral choice affords man’s
Feet crackling ice
To tread, and feet are
A sensational device
.
—Marianne Moore, “Man’s Feet Are a Sensational Device”
(long-distance runner)
A
FTER LOSING MY
home in Malibu to a messy and painful foreclosure, I moved to the Hawaiian Island of Maui to chill out. I hadn’t yet quit living wildly or using drugs, but I did start to make some important changes. I began eating with some consciousness, enjoying the fantastic array of local fruits and seafood. I even decided to reclaim my physical body, which had taken far too much abuse the past several years, and joined a six-man outrigger canoe team made up of five other guys over the age of thirty-five.
To get in shape for the difficult daily ocean paddling workouts, I decided to start running. I’d never been very fit, and my first attempts were far from pleasurable. I purchased a pair of serviceable running shoes and took daily early morning jaunts on gravel pathways paralleling the ocean. How exhilarating these workouts became. Slowly, but surely, I gained strength and endurance, and my running went from being a chore to a pleasure to a passion.
Fat began to melt away, replaced by the leanness associated with long-distance runners. I became fanatical about my running. My addictive personality was switching from negative and self-destructive drug addiction to life-affirming exercise addiction. Within six months, I was running several miles a day, pushing myself in the early morning sun to go farther, run faster.
One day, I read in the newspaper about the upcoming Honolulu
Marathon, and a new challenge was born. I would have about two months to train, and it became a full-blown obsession. I bought a book on marathon training and followed it religiously. It was extremely hard work, building my endurance for this grueling ordeal, but I loved it. Aside from my daily training runs, I continued paddling canoe. Since I wasn’t working, preparation for the marathon became my life. I ate properly and got plenty of sleep. All was going exceptionally well until about two weeks before the marathon was to be held. I was in the best shape of my life, both physically and mentally, but I began to notice pain in the toes of my right foot. I tried to continue my training regimen, hoping it was only a temporary condition, but the pain got progressively worse. Finally I made an appointment with a local doctor and discovered, to his seeming amusement, that I had fractured three of my toes from the continual pounding. I was told there was no way I could run with this injury. I was more than disappointed not to participate in the Honolulu Marathon, an event for which I had worked my butt off. But I still experienced an inner joy because I had found a life force deep inside me that I never knew existed.
Two years later I was back in Los Angeles, still running with conviction, entering 10K races almost every weekend, and becoming a complete devotee to my new sport. I had begun reading all I could about running and was fascinated with what I was learning about the marathon. The idea that anyone, let alone me, could run 26.2 miles was mesmerizing.
I started to read about this runner named Alberto Salazar, who was tearing up the world of distance running with his record-shattering marathon performances. I remember being totally spellbound watching him do battle with a runner named Dick Beardsley in the 1982 Boston Marathon, while both of them broke the existing world’s record. The race was referred to in
Runner’s World
magazine as “the duel in the sun.” They ran so close to each other that for most of the last half of the race, Beardsley, while in the lead, monitored Salazar’s progress by watching his shadow on the asphalt. “Neither
man broke, and neither, in any meaningful sense, lost,” according to the magazine.
“Damn,” I remember thinking, “this is something I got to do.” In the summer of 1984, I ran and completed the inaugural running of the Los Angeles Marathon. Who would have suspected that twenty years later I’d be interviewing Dick Beardsley for my book on recovering substance abusers?
I met Dick at The Lenox on Boylston Street in Boston on April 19, 2004, twenty-two years to the day when he competed with Alberto Salazar in the most momentous Boston Marathon ever run. We went up to his room to do the interview and check out the marathon on television. I asked him if watching the elite runners line up at the starting line didn’t make him itchy to run with them. A huge smile burst from his face and he chuckled. He told me that to ensure against this happening, he had gone for a leisurely twenty-mile run the day before. No way could he compete in a marathon today. Especially in heat that was approaching eighty degrees.
If you met Dick, you’d guess he is a runner. Rail thin, high-waisted, with a powerful chest, bones in his face that stretch the skin taut, and legs that are extra long. A person who shucks off running three marathons in two weeks, winning one of them, as “no sweat.”
Dick tells his story with great enthusiasm, eager to share his experience with those who might be helped by it.
To account for my addiction, I go back to my childhood. My mom and dad drank a lot. They were both alcoholics, but I didn’t know that at the time. From when he got up in the morning until he went to bed, for the most part, he held an alcoholic drink in his hand. But as a young kid, you never think much of that. And my mom—you hardly ever saw her drink except if my folks had company over. But playing hide-and-seek with my two younger sisters, we’d find empty bottles under the bed or a half-emptied
bottle in the utility room—some kind of booze. Every once in a while my sisters and I snuck into the back room hiding, and my mother would be there drinking out of a paper bag. We never put two and two together.
When I was in the neighborhood of eight, it started getting rough around home in the evenings. My folks had been drinking all day, and my dad had a short temper anyhow. And then when he was drinking, it just took the smallest thing to set him off. And when my mom would get to drinking, she’d get real obnoxious. If you said, “It’s a beautiful day out,” she’d reply, “Nah, it’s terrible out.” We’d get around the table for supper, and, gosh, my dad all of a sudden would blow up because there wasn’t enough. We’d be eating sweet corn and there wasn’t enough butter on the table. Or the saltshakers weren’t completely filled up.
I remember a couple of times seeing my dad whack my mom right off the back of the chair. I thought, gosh, when I get older and have kids, that is not for me. I’m not going to be drinking and doing that kind of stuff. And my parents—I’m sure it was because of the alcohol—after about twenty-two years of marriage, they ended up divorcing.
But the good part of that whole story is my dad finally found sobriety in 1982 and had fourteen years sober before he passed away from cancer. And he became my best friend. It was amazing how when he quit drinking, we reconnected big time. My mom found sobriety a lot later in life, but she did before she passed away, unfortunately also from cancer. So I saw them drunk and realized, “Man, this isn’t for me.” Then as I got older and into high school, of course on the weekends—I came from a small town—kids were always partying and doing drugs. I never did any illicit type of drug in my life. But I remember coming back to school on a Monday and a bunch of my buddies said, “Oh Beard, you missed a great kegger out in so-and-so’s pasture Saturday night. Man, we were all drunk and havin’ a good time.” And I thought, “Euh!” I could see what the drinking did to my folks. When I turned eighteen, in the state of Minnesota back then you could legally drink. So I thought, “I want to just see what it’s like. I might as well try it for myself.” Some buddies had a birthday party for me in some pasture. I was going to stay there all night, so I wouldn’t be driving. We had a bunch of friends and a big bonfire, and I had, I don’t know, fifteen,
eighteen beers. I went from not drinking at all to all those pints. I mean it was coming out both ends! I had a headache for a week. And I thought, “If this is what drinking is all about, forget it!” So that initiation was a good thing. It turned me completely off of that.